DIALOGUE WITH PATRICIA ABRAMOVICH

September 22, 2010

Besides being highly gifted, Patricia is a very easy artist to work with. When you run into someone like that, you want to find out more about who they are, how they developed their style, why they create what they do.

Here are the facts: Patricia was born in Algeria, raised in Paris and moved to Israel as a young adult. She is a self-taught painter and has exhibited widely in the US and Europe. She is represented by multiple galleries. Her accomplishments are significant.

I wanted to interview Patricia because her work is exciting, because I like her and because I knew she would be open.

To start, Patricia tells me that painting is like breathing – she can’t live without either. Like most of us, she may not paint every day, but each day that she doesn’t paint starts an itch that can’t be stopped until she picks up her knife again.

So that’s point two – Patricia’s developed a technique that relies exclusively on the palette knife. She started with brushes and oils, and now uses knives and oils, building the colors as she goes.

All of which brings us to the question I really wanted to discuss.

Most artists develop a style and work within a subject area. Then, as good artists do, curiosity or intuition moves them to change their style or subject area, and so their work evolves over their careers. In Patricia’s case, she uses her knife technique to paint landscapes or pure abstracts simultaneously. So how does she choose which to do and why?

Patricia’s working style is emotional and expressive. That is true whether she’s creating an interpretive landscape or an abstract. Since Patricia’s landscapes are interpolations of many visual items from her travels, they too are abstractions, in a sense.

Patricia tells me that she paints by feeling. She chooses her colors based upon her moods. So here we have an artist who is wholly intuitive. Looking at photos of her travels, she relives her feelings from those moments. The feelings drive her creative inspiration, supplemented by the colors which, that day, reflect those feelings. The combination of creative inspiration, feelings and color drive her choice on any given day whether to create a landscape or abstract.